After not racing for a few weekends and getting some hard training in I was hungry for some racing! I was racing the 15-18 juniors and the cat 3s so we had to get there pretty early. The course was really fun and technical as well as physically challenging. I won the 15-18 which was under 25 minutes long and then rested until it was time to get warmed up for the cat 3s at 3:30.The course went from frozen to muddy through out the day and then back to freezing as the sun went down during the 3s. We lined up and took off, I would have pulled the hole shot but halfway down the starting straight my front derailer shifted my chain off to the out side for no apparent reason. I was 10th into the first corner and unfortunately my good friend and hardest competition, Andy Schmidt was first into the corner and took off. I made a few aggressive passes and once we got to the huge hill 1/4th of the way through the lap, I charged up it and into second place. Unfortunately I didn't have the legs to charge all the way up to Andy, so I rode the whole six lap race solo, about 20 seconds ahead of a group of four chasing hard. I had to work super hard to stay ahead and was a bit disappointed that I lost the chance to battle it out for first due to dumb mishap and bad legs. It was still good fun and now a lot more training until nationals!
